Calendaring with Entourage

You can use Entourage not only to access email, but also to use an online calendar that you can access from any exchange client and that you can give other people access to, and to share contacts, tasks, files and folders with your colleagues. This guide will explain how you transfer events from your existing Entourage calendar on your local computer into the online calendar, how to share your calendar with your colleagues, how to schedule a meeting using Entourage, and how to synchronise Entourage with the Nexus server to ensure your information is always up-to-date and correct.

The following sections assume you have already successfully configured Entourage to access Oxford Nexus (the Oxford University Exchange server).

1. Sharing Calendars

Using Entourage with an Exchange account such as Nexus enables you to share your online calendar with colleagues within the university.

To share your calendar with a colleague, control-click on the calendar (it is important you select the calendar listed under your IT Services Nexus account and not your local calendar listed under On My Computer). On the contextual menu that appears, click on Sharing.

Figure 2. Selecting 'sharing' from the Calendar section in Nexus

The Folder Properties window opens. Make sure the Permissions tab is chosen and click on the Add User... button.

Figure 3. Folder Properties window with Permissions tab

The Select User window opens. This will permit you to find the user you want to share your calendar with (please note that to make the sharing work reliably, it has to be based on the user's alias, as described below). Enter the user's name in the search box near the top left of the window and click the Find button.

Figure 4. 'Select User' window

Control-click next to Job Title and select Alias from the pop-up list.

Figure 5. Selecting the Alias option

Make a note of the relevant alias for the user you are looking for.

Click on the Advanced button.

When the Advanced window is displayed, type in the user’s alias in the Account ID box and click OK.

Figure 6. The Advanced window, for choosing user by alias

This will return you to the Permissions window. You must now assign specific permissions to this user. To do so, select their name and click on the Permission Level drop-down menu.

Figure 7. Permissions window (Folder Properties)

Select the appropriate level of permissions. For example, Nonediting Author will allow the other person to see the calendar itself as well as individual events and to create new events, but not to edit existing events.

Figure 8. Selecting permission level

In this example, Nonediting Author was selected and you can see in the screenshot below that Create Items, Read Items and Folder Visible are now ticked. Click OK to complete the process.

Figure 9. Permissions updated

Private calendar events: Some clients do not fully support private items and your private items may be revealed to those you share your calendar with. Please see the "How private are my private calendar entries?" entry in the Nexus FAQ for more details.

2. Uploading events from your local calendar

If you have previously used Entourage to keep an electronic calendar on your computer, it is likely that it contains events you will need to transfer to the calendar on the Exchange server. In the example below, you can see that on the left, the Calendar that is highlighted is located in the On My Computer folder and therefore on your own machine rather than on the server. Under the highlighted calendar, there is an item Calendar Views. One of the options it offers is All Events. Click on this option.

This should bring up the events that you saw above in week view in the following format. If you have already entered some events in your online calendar as well as in the local Entourage Calendar, ensure On My Computer is selected, as it is below.

Go to the [Edit] menu and click on Select all. This should highlight all events in blue. You can then click on them and, without releasing the trackpad button, drag them onto the calendar listed under the name you have given your Exchange account, in the example below OUCS Nexus. The image shows the local events being dragged to the Nexus calendar.

If you now open the calendar on the Exchange server - in the image below, this calendar is now highlighted in blue - you will see it has added the events from your local calendar.

3. Where next?

Now that you have found out how to use Entourage with Nexus calendars you may like to have a look at further information on Entourage: